by Bryce Edwards

27 May 2010

Key to Victory – John Pagani on the Progressives' 2008 campaign

Jim Anderton’s Progressive party has found that the more active candidates that it fields in elections, the lower its party vote is. That’s one of the lessons given by Anderton’s former spin doctor, John Pagani, in his chapter in the new post-election book Key to Victory: The New Zealand General Election of 2008 edited by Stephen Levine and Nigel S. Roberts. Pagani provides a fairly analytical and detailed account of the Progressive campaign, as well as a very strong criticism of the Electoral Commission’s role in policing the Electoral Finance Act. [Read more below]

Campaign themes and techniques

As a fledgling minor party without any really obvious reason to exist, the Progressive Party has also struggled in elections to be anything more than a vehicle for Jim Anderton. In 2008 the party’s resulting lack of prominence was a problem, according to Pagani, as only 18% of voters had even heard of the party. Because awareness of the party leader was three times higher, ‘for 2008 the party was registered as “Jim Anderton’s Progressive” Party’ (p.100).

Pagani also notes the interesting fact that having active electorate candidates seems to count against the party’s attempt to build up its party vote:

we also noticed that, Wigram aside, Progressives got about 20 per cent more votes where the candidate was on the ballot but inactive than when the candidate went out and actually campaigned, In other words, inert candidates did better! One explanation is that candidates from a micro party can hope to attract only one vote, so active candidates were converting party votes to wasted electorate votes. There is, of course, an alternative, somewhat less appealing, explanation (pp.100-101).

The lesson for the 2008 campaign was to ensure that only about 12 of the party’s candidates actually campaigned in their electorates. As an example of this strategy, Pagani cites the performance of his own mother-in-law who he had stand as a Progressive candidate: ‘Elspeth Sandys, never even visited Christchurch East and yet she gained the third highest Progressive Party vote in the country’ (p.101). Pagani diplomatically says that ‘since she is my mother-in-law I might advance the view that her vote represented a reward for her sparkling personality’ (p.101).

Pagani does a great job of detailing the Progressives campaign techniques and expenditure:

The campaign itself consisted of:

Taxpayer-funded television and radio advertisements, for which we had a $100,000 budget. Most of the expenditure went into radio so that we could target it at voters aged 40+ in the regions where we had more support

About 150 billboards nationally – half in Auckland, 40 or so in Christchurch and the rest scattered around the country;

130,000 leaflets dropped in the Progressives’ highest polling seats from 2005 where we had some organization. We have a sophisticated leaflet tracking operation to ensure nothing just sits in sheds;

newspaper ads in the highest priority electorates. We spent about $10,000 outside Christchurch…. In Christchurch we ran huge four-page, four-colour banner wrap-arounds of every free paper delivered to every home in the city;

an unusual website. Experience told us that party website traffic increases by tens of thousands of visits in the last two days or so before an election’ (pp.102-103).

Unsurprisingly, we also find out that, ‘Jim Anderton has a formidable operation in Wigram, including a database with the names of around 10,000 supporters in the electorate’ (p.100).

The party’s themes for its campaign were, according to Pagani: ‘Kiwibank; affordable dental care; a package of early intervention and anti-alcohol and drugs measures; and… we targeted National’s intention to abolish’ the $700m research and development fund (p.102).

Political finance and the EFA

The Progressives apparently had a campaign budget of about $120,000. And Pagani explains that it is just too expensive to have candidates standing in every seat, as at $300 to put each on the ballot would meaning that ‘Running candidates in all 70 electorates would cost around $20,000 – a huge slice of a total discretionary campaign budget’ (p.101).

Although the Progressive Party was fully supportive of Labour’s Electoral Finance Act, ironically this became the most contentious part of both the Progressives’ campaign and Pagani’s chapter:

The EFA did not work well because the Electoral Commission implemented the Act incompetently. The commission refused to give advice, operated a dreadful process that would never withstand judicial scrutiny, and referred to the police matters that plainly had no chance of succeeding in court. The referrals did immense damage in bad publicity and in costing a good part of our budget in legal fees. The charges were entirely dropped after the election, as every lawyer who looked at the issue knew they would be. By its weakness, incompetence and truculence, the commission made itself a partisan in the election campaign. Its behaviour proved a significant impediment to our ability to fairly contest the 2008 election (p.102).

Although Pagani’s points are probably fairly legitimate, by directing his ire at the Electoral Commission, he’s probably missing the real target. The Electoral Finance Act was obviously a complex dog of an Act for the commission to administer, and Pagani and the Progressives should be reflecting on their support for the terrible legislation in the first place.

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Further book details:

Table of contents

Preface - Stephen Levine and Nigel S. Roberts

Overview of the
Election

2008: Key to victory
- Stephen Levine and Nigel S. Roberts

2008: The last
baby-boomer election - Colin James

2008: Leadership
during transition - Jon Johansson

Political Party
Perspectives

National - Steven
Joyce

Labour - Grant
Robertson

The Greens -
Catherine Delahunty

ACT - John
Boscawen

The Maori Party -
Rahui Katene

The Progressives
- John Pagani

United Future -
Rob Eaddy

New Zealand First
- Damian Edwards

New Zealand’s party
system: a multi-party mirage? - Jennifer Curtin and Raymond Miller

Media Perspectives

2008: Images of
political leadership in the campaign - Claire Robinson

Key to
Victoryis the
story of the New Zealand general election of 2008, in which the experienced and
long-serving prime minister, Helen Clark, was ousted by a political newcomer –
National’s John Key.
Veteran academic commentators Colin James, Jon Johansson, and Therese Arseneau
offer perspectives on what New Zealanders were voting for when endorsing John
Key and National, and what they were voting against. Several MPs elected for
the first time in 2008 provide first-hand accounts of their parties’ campaigns,
including Labour’s Grant Robertson; the Greens’ Catherine Delahunty; the Maori
Party’s Rahui Katene; ACT’s John Boscawen; and the director of National’s
winning campaign, Steven Joyce, appointed to Cabinet following National’s
victory. New Zealand First’s doomed campaign is described by its campaign
director, Damian Edwards, while party strategists John Pagani and Rob Eaddy
provide accounts of the Progressive and United Future campaigns.Key to Victoryalso investigates the important issues of the 2008
election, such as the impact of the Electoral Finance Act, and the likely
future of New Zealand’s remaining small parties.
During the 2008 campaign political parties started getting to grips with
websites, blogs, Facebook and YouTube, and ‘prediction markets’ competed with
traditional polls in forecasting the election results. The book describes these
developments and provides insights into the use of the media by John Key and Helen
Clark in their rival campaigns for leadership. International reaction to the
New Zealand campaign and the country’s vote for change is also highlighted.
Key to Victory includes a special DVD with excerpts from key campaign events
including the televised leaders’ debates, the leaders’ opening night campaign
addresses, parties’ TV ads and campaign billboards.

Comments

Key to Victory – John Pagani on the Progressives' 2008 campaign

Jim Anderton’s Progressive party has found that the more active candidates that it fields in elections, the lower its party vote is. That’s one of the lessons given by Anderton’s former spin doctor, John Pagani, in his chapter in the new post-election book Key to Victory: The New Zealand General Election of 2008 edited by Stephen Levine and Nigel S. Roberts. Pagani provides a fairly analytical and detailed account of the Progressive campaign, as well as a very strong criticism of the Electoral Commission’s role in policing the Electoral Finance Act. [Read more below]